


A for America

by pyalgroundblz (acidtonguejenny)



Series: A for America Verse [1]
Category: Captain America (2011), Marvel (Movies)
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alternate Universe - Canon, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-25
Updated: 2012-08-25
Packaged: 2017-11-12 21:05:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/495641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acidtonguejenny/pseuds/pyalgroundblz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Steve was a young man he kept his alignment under wraps. It was easier to let folks assume he was a beta, when he himself had trouble believing he was an alpha most days</p>
            </blockquote>





	A for America

When Steve was a young man he kept his alignment to himself. Too scrawny to be an alpha, too sickly to be a childbearing omega, it was easier to let folks to assume he was a beta. He himself had trouble believing he was an alpha most days, and that wasn't him being self-depreciative--alphas were made strong to command respect, to protect betas and omegas. While Steve thought himself a good enough person, his campaign against bullies seemed to always come down to him distracting muggers with his face while the victims fled. 

School taught that in the past people could tell alphas and omegas from betas by scent, even when they weren't releasing reproductive pheromones. Nowadays it wasn't so. Whether from pollution, or the same strange biological changes that left omega males unable to nurse their young, no one knew why they'd lost the ability. There were dozens of theories, including that God had just seen fit to make things harder on them. Steve himself was only grateful that he could lie about his nature.

He tested it to be sure of course, not that the discovery of a deflated knot at the base of his penis left much doubt. He went with a bunch of schoolboys to tip hats at the omega female who owned a produce stand two blocks from the picture show. They blushed and stammered like the barely-pubescent boys they were, the alphas among them trembling in the face of her ending-heat scent. She nodded back to them and continued stacking tomatoes, probably used to gawking adolescents if the stories he'd heard were true, which was a shame. Steve hung back to apologize, keeping a tight lid on his own reaction to her, and she smiled at him and gave him an apple. 

One in thirty children were born omegas, compared to the fourteen in thirty alphas and fifteen in thirty betas. Common enough that you could scent a handful in various beginning- and ending- stages of heat on a walk down a busy street, that you had one somewhere in your family, but not so much that an omega like the stall-owner wasn't a bit of a draw. 

Throughout the years he found it surprisingly easy to keep a handle on the hormone spikes that would out him as an alpha. Puberty was hard: his spikes were fiercer, frequent, and his control untested. Bucky's group dates helped a little in that--some of the beta females wore omega-coming-to-heat perfumes that were enough to get his attention, but synthetic enough that he could stamp it down. When he felt more confident he would sometimes walk past the dens where unattached omegas went to wait out their biannual heat in safety and relative comfort. 

Most of those times were a mistake on his part, a juvenile one. More than once he ending up shaking in an alleyway, holding his gut and fending off the explosive hormonal reaction so many concentrated pheromones inevitably caused. 

More than the financial burden he knew his poor health was on his mother, more than his failed attempts to protect people, moments like those were what got to him. The fact that his body was physically too weak to properly withstand its own pheromones, that he could barely breathe through the onset of reaction-rut and courted an asthmatic attack each time…It seemed like a real encounter with an omega would kill him sooner than it would produce a baby.

And when he caught himself pondering that line of thought, Steve was sure to quickly correct himself. Alpha or not, he had about as much chance of landing an omega for a mate as he did getting overseas. He had trouble enough getting a pretty beta dame to look down her nose at him, and getting to the war, well…

His integrity prevented him from checking 'beta' at the first recruiting office he visited, another mistake. The sergeant laughed at him, and grew angry when he didn't blush or laugh or whatever was the expected reaction. He was threatened with the police department because don't you know people were dying over there son? Don't you have any goddamn respect for those men and women? 

Military examiners didn't care what you were as long as you weren't a precious omega, and they only kept the equipment to determine that much. No matter what name he put down after that, he always checked 'beta', and they never looked past it. 

Not that it mattered, really. They dismissed him just as quickly.

Of the handful of people he counted as close throughout the years, only Bucky knew, and even that was an accident. One of his dates was a real-deal omega female who was starting up (Bucky swears) a controlled heat for the emotional high and dizzying affect it had on those in sustained proximity, and it caught Steve blindside halfway through the picture show. He made it outside back before anything untoward could happen, and Bucky followed him out to find him trying not to vomit. 

He gaped at him. "You're--Steve, you're an alpha?"

Steve hadn't been so embarrassed in…

"Go ahead," he said, lurching with another wave of _omegaomega_ omega and _TOO MUCH_. "laugh, you probably want to. I would." He wouldn't.

Bucky shook his head. He rubbed Steve's back after a second of hesitation, light strokes gentle enough that it actually helped. 

"I wouldn't laugh at you Steve, not for something like this." 

Steve believed him.

Bucky went back inside and told the girls something had come up at home. The omega pouted, disappointment palatable in her scent, but he placated her with a kiss and a wink and something said against her ear. She went away with an extra swing in her hip that hurt Steve to watch, friend following along. 

As they walked, "Damn, guy, all our lives and I've never picked you for it." Bucky sounded impressed, and Steve preened a little. Controlling his nature for so many years had been difficult, damn it, he welcomed the acknowledgment. "Could've gone on thinking you were a beta for…forever. Does your mother know?"

Steve grimaced. "No. Not my doctors either. Pretty much just you." 

He whistled. "Christ. Oh, man Steve I'm so sorry though. I smelled it coming on her but didn't think--"

Steve wondered exactly how early into things Bucky's beta senses told him what was going on. "You didn't know, don't sweat it."

Bucky aimed a friendly swat. "Yeah, I s'pose. Shame about her wasting that heat, though…" Bucky rolled his shoulders. "I guess you've never palled around with an omega running hot before, but it's sure _something_. Like alcohol to the blood, without that hangover."

Steve snorted good-naturedly. "Whatever you say."

Not long after that Bucky shipped out, and Steve took up with Dr. Erskine. The good doctor was the second in as many years to discover his secret. Steve was sure to confess before he could be found out again in some incredibly humiliating way.

He looked briefly surprised, but almost as quickly his expression turned thoughtful.

"Doc?" Steve ventured, uncertain.

"Hmm. There _have_ been arguments throughout history that propose alignment is as much determined by an individual's character as by physical state and genetics. I have never put much stock in them," he smiled, and Steve smiled back reflexively. "but it is a most interesting point to consider."

Erskine didn't appear to have spread the revelation, for which Steve was grateful. There had been dozens and dozens of tests planned for him after the experiment, and Steve had no doubt that at least one would concern his alignment. He imagined the reports in the event of success, ' _miracle serum converts skinny beta into alpha Super Soldier_ ', and bristled at the idea of them, taking pride in his nature for possibly the first time since learning about it. 

But when Dr. Erskine was killed and Steve was shuffled to the side, there were no tests. He was given a standard check up, poked and awed at for an afternoon, and waved off to the barracks with a duffle of clothing to replace his own and a set of tags marked _**B**_ for beta.

He let it stand, almost didn't think to argue it. Then he was a dancing show monkey rather than the soldier he'd signed up to be, and when the glamour wore off he found he had no dignity left. Meanwhile the war was going steady, going harder, and more alpha and beta men and women were being sent to fight it. 

With the girls in the dancing troop, Steve got lucky. He got really, really lucky. Of the clutch of them, five were alphas and two were omegas, and with Janet, Julia, Marianne, and Georgia in close courters, Phillipa and Louise were careful with their heats; any allowances that would have been made for his benefit, had anyone known, where done instead for those five. The other girls told Steve that it was pretty common in show biz to have an omega or two running controlled heats on opening night. Got the actors going strong and the audience pumped for a show. Out of interest for their alpha fellows, neither of the omegas played with their heats on the road. When Phillipa and Louise felt their biannuals building up (with a few of the beta girls realizing before they did), the troop pulled off course to meet Louise's mate in St. Paul and allow Phillipa to find a den to retreat to for the next week.

"It's nice that the director waits for them," Steve commented once to a beta, Felicity, who flipped a curl and smiled. 

"Not everyone would. You hear about it sometimes, a troop will leave a poor omega in a strange city without so much as a 'best of luck' and a final paystub. But we're family, Steve," she rocked into him, bumped elbows with a girlish look. "And we act like it."

Steve clinked their glasses with a quiet _amen_ , and felt a little better about his dancing-monkey designation. 

It confused him sometimes, though. Omegas were prized by society, protected by it. Ancient times had bred what was practically reverence into the general population. The children of omegas sometimes found life easier than those of beta females, and communities rallied around a distressed omega. He'd seen it before in the city--betas alerting an omega to encroaching heat, occasional groups gathering to escort one already _in_ heat to a den or waiting mate or otherwise safe location. 

There were cultural taboos that condemned the harming of an omega. The reaction it raised in folk was comparable to what would come of threatening children. To think of people getting away with abandoning an omega in need like that…

When the two rejoined the group at the end of the week, Louise purring and Phillipa having made several friends at the den, both of them wafting ending-heat pheromones, he almost wished that he hadn't been so lucky. 

Steve hadn't been caught by surprise by a fertile-omega since before the experiment, and more than a little he wondered how this new, obnoxiously healthy body would handle reaction-rut. He could only imagine good things, and suddenly the idea of finding a sweet omega with a wonderful smile didn't seem so unattainable. Except.

Then they were sent to entertain active soldiers, and Peggy was there.

Peggy had Steve puzzled about since he'd allowed himself to stop and really notice her. For the weeks leading up to the serum she'd mostly been a pretty dame who spoke to him like a person, rather than like a cripple or a child. She was one of few during that time to do so, along with the doctor himself, and she'd been yet another woman he wouldn't think about, because _she_ sure wouldn't. He never even learned her alignment.

Her involvement in the military all but immediately ended the possibility of her being an omega. Her presence in the training camps and later, overseas, killed the corpse of it. But of those options left, Steve hadn't a clue.

It was an odd position they found themselves in, when they began their prelude to dancing. If she was an alpha like him, well--it wasn't unheard of, but nor was it strictly approved of, and word had it alpha-alpha matings were never easy. Conceiving was said to be difficult between opposite-sex pairs. Others said they couldn't share bedrooms or even, some insisted, houses, because of the strain of sharing territory. 

If she was a beta, then Steve wouldn't stop to look back at his idyllic omega-behind-a-white-picket-fence fantasy.

But that was just on his side of things--Peggy was still in the dark about the truth of him, and he was uncertain if he should tell her. 

Usually by the time he arrived at those avenues of thought, he rolled over and went to sleep.

In the Howling Commandos there weren't secrets so much as there were things the others hadn't learned about you let. He didn't try to hide it, and when in that one brothel in Florence the alphas among them beat a hasty retreat at one beta's warning of an omega in full-bloom, biannual heat inside, Steve was outside as quickly as any of them. By the end of their run together Steve was fairly sure all of them knew him, and those that didn't hadn't been excluded from the club on purpose.

He only smirked when he noticed on gray morning that his dog tags had been altered accordingly, the _**B**_ scratched over and a crookedly **_A_** sloppily cut into the corner. 

When Bucky was lost and he raced the Commandos for the bar, Steve only hoped that his alignment's weakness to influencers would balance out his super soldier metabolism, and let him forget it for a few hours. It didn't, but practice made perfect, supposedly. 

Peggy broke him of it. Not with a lecture or a look or even with her disappointment, though any of those would've worked as well. Instead she followed him to the bar, and followed him drink for drink, until fear for her and several small epiphanies triggered a change of heart.

He started out the only one knowing his secret, and went down feeling like he had somehow come full circle. For all the Commandos and the friends he'd made, he'd lost Bucky, he'd lost Erskine, and he was giving up Peggy, leaving her alone with no one to follow her to the bar…

But. Alpha or beta, he chose to believe his girl was made of stronger stuff than that, and he did believe it. When he went down, he was thinking again about how no matter what Peggy had been, they would have fought to make it work, and he went to ice content.

**Author's Note:**

> Some notes on the dynamics as they'll work in this story(/hopefully verse):  
> * Omegas have natural heat twice a year that lasts 5-9 days, can trigger smaller, easier heats on command when in good health  
> * Betas are very sensitive to the initial subtler changes in alpha and omega chemistry, can detect oncoming and largely finished heats/ruts.  
> * Omega heat pheromones causes alphas to become more agressive with other alphas, severely cuts their impulse control, and leaves them vulnerable to influence from substances or people (especially omegas). This triggered state is called rut.  
> * Sudden exposure to omega pheromones trips reaction-rut, a more violent incarnation of typical rut  
> * Women of alpha and beta persuasion are permitted to join the military in nearly every capacity men are and subject to draft, birth control supplied by default towards the end of WWII  
> * Omegas of either male or female sex are not permitted to serve in the military.


End file.
